Some numbers in the political sphere seem to be chosen rather arbitrarily. One example might be the rule set out by the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1995 that the overall tax load on assets must be limited to 50% of the yield on those assets. This rule was...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

Die Forderung nach einem Abbau der sogenannten kalten Progression im Einkommensteuertarif ist zu einem Dauerbrenner in der steuer- und finanzpolitischen Reformdebatte geworden. Doch womit wird diese Forderung eigentlich begründet? Welche Belastungen gehen tatsächlich von der kalten Progression...

With the current high inflation, bracket creep is back on the agenda. The federal government has introduced a bill to compensate for this effect, among other things, by shifting income tax brackets. In the debate on bracket creep, the point of reference is very important. Results differ greatly...

This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...

Dieses Papier untersucht, ob die Festlegung der durchschnittlichen Steuerbelastung deutscher Spitzenverdiener zwischen 1958 und 2011 von der Zusammensetzung der Bundesregierung in Form von Verbindungen zur nationalen (akademischen) Elite und dem Unternehmensnetzwerk beeinflusst wird. Die...

As from a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms, we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on the empirical results of a survey of the population in...

From a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms. In this contribution we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on three surveys among the German...